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Unit Contributions to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion

Fri, 11/16/2018 - 08:58 — jmagoto
Academic Years: 
2018-2019
Department: 
Yamada Language Center
Division: 
Humanities
Academics
2. Staff: 

Goal: Diversifying our staff (student, temporary, and professional)
Our small staff has always been linguistically diverse, and skewed towards international students and faculty (usually more than half of our staff). This year we’ve intentionally sought out and hired 4 Pathways students to bring more diversity among our American undergraduate staff. In addition, we have been able to add three part time or limited duration appointments (.65 FTE): they include a Turkish-American instructor, a Mexican-American graphic designer, and an Asian-American web designer.

4. Undergraduate Programs: 

Goal: Improving language opportunities for students and the community to study indigenous languages

We’re partnering with NILI and Latin American Studies to add two indigenous language opportunities to our Self Study Language Program this year, Chinuk Wawa (a language of the PNW Coastal and Columbian River tribes) and Quechua (the language of the Incas, spoken by 8 million people in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. We will also partner with Linguistics’ Language Diversity Ambassador Program in outreach efforts.

5. Outreach and Partnerships: 

Goal: Increasing our community outreach efforts

Besides our annual FLIS day, which bring 1200 high schoolers to campus for a day of language and culture learning, we’ve embarked on a campaign to sponsor a variety of professional and community events that make the UO/Eugene/Springfield more welcoming and inclusive. We hosted a public forum on Suicide Prevention for the local National Alliance on Mental Illness, which featured Spanish language translation. We co-sponsored the COFLT conference in Fall 2017 (it hadn’t been held outside of Portland in more than a decade). In 2019 we’ll bring an International conference on Language and Technology to Eugene, which hasn’t been held in the PNW in two decades.

6. Other: 

Goal: Seeking federal grants for teacher training in less commonly taught languages

We just finished hosting 74 Fulbright scholars who were in Eugene for a week. It was successful and we believe that it’ll be funded for 4 more years. These scholars came from 34 countries and will be teaching 27 languages at 33 different universities across the country. This partnership with Language Teaching Studies and International Affairs is both an excellent professional development opportunity (we employed 12 UO language teachers and 10 graduate students in languages) and a recruitment effort. Many of these scholars are under-represented countries at the UO; they are seeking further graduate work upon finishing their Fulbright stay, and we want the UO to be one of the schools they consider first.